On Self-Pity

Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

-D.H. Lawrence (1929)

Here we are with a particularly bad case of the Mondays. Missed my usual bus, late to work, forgot to process payroll last week, had to confess to forgetting to process payroll, etc. It's been a rough morning. Poor me!

But really things aren't so bad. They never are. I had an absolutely lovely weekend with friends and softball and booze and fun. For some reason, all those good times just go down the drain the moment that first ray of morning light hits the pillow, shortly followed by the annoyingly familiar melody of my alarm. Oh, poor me! I have to get up and go to work!

Fortunately, I snapped out of my own wallowing when I came across Judith Warner's Domestic Disturbances blog on the NY Times. In particular, her recent post on the supposed American hatred of educated women. Talk about self-pity.

Warner leads this rambling post with an anecdote about a female professor from Montana who was arrested two years ago for dropping off her 12-year-old daughter and friend at the mall... and putting them in charge of three younger children, 8, 7, and 3-years-old. She thought they would be safe at the mall while she went home and took a nap. Um, what?

Warner describes how the police intervened when the 2 older children wandered away from the younger ones (as you might expect 12-year-olds to do) and then called the mother at home. When the mother arrived, she wasn't allowed to explain herself. The police even told her to "Be quiet." Ouch! But she was really tired!

The state prosecutor (a successful woman herself?) seemed to have some sort of personal vendetta against the mother, and her attorney encouraged her to plea guilty to the child endangerment charges. And the worst of it? The mom was forced to take a parenting class. A PARENTING CLASS. Could there be anything more humiliating? (sarcasm)

Somehow for Warner, this story illustrates a growing theme in American society:

What really sent my head spinning after reading Kevane’s story was the degree to which it drove home the fact that our country’s resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women is spiraling out of control.

Warner goes on to lament about the Patriarchy, the history of misogyny, Sarah Palin and blah blah blah. WHAT'S YOUR POINT? Oh, here is it:

The hatred of women — in all its archaic, phantasmagoric forms — is still alive and well in our society, and when directed at well-educated women, it’s socially acceptable, too. Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place.

Poor elite, educated women! How hard it is to know so much! The weight of the world is carried on their shoulders, and they can't be troubled with petty things like, say, RESPONSIBLY CARING FOR THEIR CHILDREN. So please, be nice to them. Especially when they hit you with their cars while you cross the street because they were distracted trying to find NPR on the radio dial. Or when their children run rampant through the shopping malls, unattended and hooting like baboons.

Just because you are educated and you are a woman and you are an IDIOT does not mean that when you get in trouble for being an IDIOT, the world is against you.

It just means you are a self-pitying idiot.

(Also, there is a magazine called "Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers"? As opposed to non-thinking mothers?)